Harry Warner 20 min read

A jubilant lawyer returns home crowing about a won case, to an apartment where the automated future has quietly rearranged family life.

Harry Warner's 1955 story follows Greg Marson into a home of babyviewers and paid remote child-minding, sketching a social SF future through domestic detail. Wry, observant golden-age SF about technology and the shape of the family. Read it for a thoughtful, understated story that finds the future in the fixtures of an ordinary home.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

20 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).